Following your heart

By Mark Kellner

http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com |
One of the things that came to mind during the recent dedication of the
National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., is how much history can
be associated with those years. That may seem obvious, but bear with me.

The amount of online material about the war years is staggering, and more
seems to be popping up all the time. The Web site for the Memorial itself
(www.wwiimemorial.com) offers a look at the site and what it means. For
those who haven't been to the Memorial yet, this location is a good
orientation.

The Google search service has over 7 million Web pages indexed that relate
to World War II, and the top ones include very useful timelines and
historical backgrounders from the Grolier Encyclopedia and the BBC.

But to stop there might cheat you out of some insights. One of the key
characteristics of the World War II era, perhaps more so than most other
wars, is the amount of postal correspondence that went from the battle front
to the home front, and vice versa. (Today it's largely e-mail and cell
phones in Iraq.) Much of this correspondence may be lost, but many of the
envelopes used to transport the mail - envelopes that have their own story
to tell - are still around, delighting collectors and intriguing historians.
Computer technology, via the Web, is helping to preserve and expand that
source of history.

The Military Postal History Society (www.militaryphs.org) is a group of
collectors who track and follow such items; they offer auctions of wartime
envelopes (known as "covers" to philatelists) and a shelf-full of
publications, books and catalogs that can help identify collectable
specimens. While no one will likely become super-rich from grandpa's hoard
of letters, the military mail of years gone by offers many clues to the
nature of those times.

Collecting other items from the war may be a bit more challenging: among the
many sites devoted to World War II collectables are numerous warnings about
faked Nazi "souvenirs" including helmets; in addition, some countries
including France and Germany have tried to block online auctions of items
from that time, following those nations' general prohibitions against
promoting or displaying Nazi symbols.

Yet, as has been mentioned here many times before, there are many ways in
which technology can be used to support and extend an interest in history.
Perhaps one will be in videotaping memories of your relatives who served in
the war and transferring those, via a computer, to DVD. With an estimated 75
percent of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II no longer
alive, making, editing and preserving such stories is of more importance now
than ever before.

APPLES VS. ORANGES? Last week's column on the relative cost of a
Windows-based PC versus that of an Apple Power Mac G5, brought a couple of
e-mail challenges. One suggested that the price of a G5 with 8 Gigabytes of
RAM was $7,200, and not the $2,500. That's true, but I merely suggested one
could go that far with the RAM; my test system did not include that amount.

The other claim was that if you build up a PC to similar specs as the
dual-processor G5, the Apple is often less expensive. Perhaps, but I still
believe you can get a decent Windows-based machine for under $1,000; a
decent Mac will hover between $799 (the lowest eMac) and $1,299 for the
cheapest iMac, which includes a flat-panel display.

JWR contributor Mark Kellner has reported on technology for industry newspapers and magazines since 1983, and has been the computer columnist for The Washington Times since 1991.Comment by clicking here.